Latest Review: "Hocus Bogus" by Romain Gary (writing as Emile Ajar)

The latest addition to our Book Reviews section is a piece by Stephen Weiner (who runs the Suspicious Humanist newsletter) about Emile Ajar/Romain Gary’s Hocus Bogus, translated from the French by David Bellos and published by Yale University Press.

Hocus Bogus was one of my favorite books from the 2011 BTBA shortlist, a delightful surprise based around a fascinating, strange hoax. Stephen lays this out in the review, so I won’t rehash it here . . .

But I will say that one of the fall books that I’m most excited about is David Bellos’s Is That a Fish in Your Ear?: Translation and the Meaning of Everything. Doesn’t look like Macmillan/Faber and Faber have a page up for this yet, but here’s a clip from the jacket copy:

Using translation as his lens, David Bellos shows how much we can learn about ourselves by exploring the ways we use translation, from the historical roots of written language to the stylistic choices fo Ingmar Bergman, from the United Nations General Assembly to the significance of James Cameron’s Avatar.

More on that as soon as we get a galley . . .

But in terms of the Hocus Bogus review, here’s the opening:

Romain Gary was an immigrant from Russia, writer of the heroic Depression and World War II generation. He came to France with his mother in the 1930s. He attended law school in Provence and joined the Air Force in that decade. When the war broke out and France was occupied, he escaped and joined the free French army of Charles DeGaulle, flying many missions and being wounded. Immediately upon the end of the war he joined the foreign service and the diplomatic corps. Initially he was posted to South America.

In the 1950s and early 1960s, Gary served as the French consul in Los Angeles, marrying the American movie star Jean Seberg. He won the immensely prestigious Prix Goncourt for The Roots of Heaven, a humanist-themed novel focusing on the protection of elephants in the newly independent Africa. This was the first adult book I ever read in the early 1960s when I was 11 years old. The heroic presence of Morel, his protagonist who had survived the camps and protected the elephants by shooting the shooters, gripped me intensely. I was interested in part because my father was an early environmentalist where we lived in Northern California, founding an organization called “People for Open Space.”